@cengland0@stolicat Yeah. That’s what I get for drunk posting on my phone at 2am… Niche… I have no idea where that would have even come from. I don’t think I’ve ever misspelled that word before. Can I blame auto-correct? Is “nitch” even a thing?!?

Edit. Yes. “Nitch” is apparently a thing, but I can’t tell from a brief DDG search what exactly that thing is…

Both, usually bluetooth for music or streaming, wired for watching videos or doing serious audio/music work. And I also have the Sennheiser RF headphones for around the house and out in the yard and watching shows late at night without bothering anyone - they have no latency issues, and better range and fidelity than bluetooth. And with all that, I still can find no reason to buy this thing …
/giphy no reason at all

I care enough about quality that I dropped some serious cash on high end over ear bluetooth headphones. But I’m not at audiophile level. Most of what I listen to is digitally compressed to some extent (because who owns physical media anymore?) so I don’t need wires… Except on my Switch, because Nintendo dropped the ball.

I was originally all mad about the headphone jack going away in popular phones because I was closer to #2. I got some noise-cancelling bluetooth headphones for my subway commute a year ago and honestly, I’m over it. Not having to worry about a wire getting tangled up on my bag and accidentally flinging my phone across a subway car when I take it off is great. Same thing for shoveling snow. When I want to listen on my nice wired headphones, I go to my computer and use that.

My car has Android Auto and I just use USB-C for that. The only time I really missed my headphone jack was in my wife’s early-2000s Corolla, but now we just use the USB-C to 3.5mm adapter and it’s fine. So I guess I have no need for this product either way. Thanks Meh!

I used to love headphone jacks, before Apple disappeared them. It was one of the things I’d consider as a happy model of success in commoditization of technology. I would literally plug my phone into my car and smile. Think about it – where else do you see that kind of ubiquity in technology, where an entire category of devices is 100% compatible with every other device in the entire category (by every company), where everything is cheap and massively available (or expensive and compatible with the cheap stuff), and it all basically lasts forever.

All this bluetooth hardware is one step forward, one step back, more fiddly, and more costly, might redial your last call for no reason, and of course Apple decided there should be a schism in better-than-SBC codec land (no aptX and variants on Apple devices). It’s not that not having wires isn’t great – I’ve got some Bluetooth earbuds by a company – but it’s the same story as other recent technical advances (SSDs, say, or streaming music) – a lot gets discarded in order to make dubious step-forward-step-backward “progress”.

I’m not sure what my point is. Can’t shake the doomy feeling that civilization peaked before I was born.

Probably, I just need to drink a bucket of coffee.

FiiO makes a nice headphone bluetooth receiver – nine hours of battery, automatically switches between two source devices. Even supports AAC, though I am ever paranoid that it’s falling back to SBC because who would ever debug some arcane Bluetooth protocol negotiation adequately (yes, nobody, would ever).

@InnocuousFarmer these cheap ass Bluetooth receivers for sale today do the automatic switching between two sources, or they at least support being paired to two sources. The manual isn’t great at fully explaining how it works.

@djslack The switching feature is such that, when you pause one source device, and play another, the second starts playing through the headphones without further intervention. I really wish it was three devices, but two is nice. Bet it’s a feature in a popular chipset or something.

I’d prefer to use Bluetooth all of the time, but battery life and durability are issues and, no, I’m not going to spend $300+ on a pair of headphones (if that would help, which I’m not sure it would). I have in- and over-ear. For my commute and when I’m on my feet in my cube at work,

I typically use wired if I’m sitting at my desk in the office, because the cord doesn’t become an issue while I’m on my ass staring at a spreadsheet or collection of bureaucratic verbiage.

Comfort is an issue on various fronts and I usually can’t stand any particular pair of anything for a while. That’s another reason I switch among wired and Bluetooth and in-ear and over-ear.

All of my listening devices vary in terms of how well they block out external noise, which sometimes is an issue and sometimes isn’t–but usually by degrees. That impacts selection case-by-case as well.

I use all kinds of Bluetooth speakers at home, a couple of which are safe in the shower.

One of the coolest things lately is that Google Home now synchronizes smart speakers. We have three smart speakers: one in the bedroom (upstairs), one in the living room, one with a screen in the kitchen. I have them grouped by “whole house” and “downstairs”. This means I can easily listen to music or a podcast uninterrupted throughout the house, a thing I would have accomplished previously with headphones. It also means that the wife and I can listen to the same thing when one of us is in the kitchen and the other is in the living room–without having to turn the volume way up, to the discomfort of one of us. I admit, she does more cooking. But when I am in the kitchen by myself–whether cleaning or cooking–I like to listen to podcasts. It was just easiest in the past to use headphones, but that also left me feeling isolated. Eventually that turned into me listening on the smart speaker in the kitchen, but worrying that it was that “sweet spot” for her of “I can hear the noise, but I can’t quite understand it”. It was awkward and more work (and never quite effective, honestly) to set up a speaker in an in-between location or, yeah, jack up the volume in the kitchen so that she could hear it in the living room. Now we listen and laugh to Wait Wait or TAL or Ask Me Another or whatever together. I know I could have done this with other equipment before, but it would have been a hassle; it’s super easy now.